Russians: The People behind the Power

11 Grandiosity and Bombast

Russian maximalism, hurling us from one extreme to the other, is a sickness of spirit, a metaphysical hysteria, an inward slavery.

—Nikolai Berdyaev, 1917

In late 2008, the state television channel Rossiya aired “the project of the year,” a series called The Name of Russia that it said would identify the greatest Russian in history. Over the course of three months, some of the country’s best-known conservative figures appeared weekly on a slick set to debate their choices in a whittling-down that would culminate in an online vote. The future Orthodox Church patriarch, Kirill, then still a bishop, lobbied for the thirteenth-century prince Alexander Nevsky, whose legendary battlefield victories over Swedish and Germanic knights, the bishop claimed, had saved Russia from annihilation. Comparing the battles to Russia’s invasion of Georgia that year, Kirill said both military efforts had signaled the country’s rebirth as a great power. Peter the Great and Lenin also ranked among top candidates, but the loudest controversy was generated by Internet voting that temporarily pushed another name to the top of the list. The leader for a time was Joseph Stalin, born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

Although the show’s creator, a veteran television personality named Alexander Liubimov, dismissed the embarrassing development as the work of computer hackers, the dictator came in third in the final results, behind the winner, Alexander Nevsky, and the number-two finisher, Piotr Stolypin, a reforming nineteenth-century prime minister to whom Putin would soon compare himself.

Unfathomable as it may have been to foreigners, and unscientific as the poll was, its outcome coincided with more rigorous surveys that reflect a very sobering trend: more than half a century after his death, a majority of Russians praise Stalin’s policies. Dismissing the irony that the tyrant was Georgian, not Russian, a Muscovite in his sixties named Igor Stepanov told me the prime overseer of the Soviet purges and other mass atrocities deserved serious consideration. “Whether the consensus is that he was good or bad for Russia remains to be seen,” Stepanov reasoned. “But failing to acknowledge Stalin’s role in history wouldn’t be right.” At the same time, a thirty-four-year-old accountant named Syleia Daripova praised Stalin for his feats. “Not everyone can accumulate power like that,” she said. “People say he murdered half the country, but you can’t deny he was a unique personality.” In 2013, a Levada poll put Brezhnev at the top of a list of “most positive” leaders in the twentieth century, according to 56 percent of respondents. He was closely followed by Lenin and Stalin.

The country’s leaders encourage such attitudes. Russian historians conservatively estimate that at least twelve and a half million people died from execution, famine and imprisonment during the seventy years of Soviet rule, although the figure of twenty million is more commonly agreed upon. But that record didn’t stop Putin from calling the communist collapse the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. Although he was referring to the trauma the event inflicted on ordinary Russians, his carefully chosen words were purposely ambiguous. In heaping praise on his old employer, the KGB—among other exercises in the exploitation of nostalgia for the stable Soviet past—he was more straightforward.

Liubomov told me in polished English that his main purpose in producing the television series had been to excite Russians’ interest in history, whatever the results. But critics assailed his program for muddling the past by ignoring prodigious state crimes. “Can you imagine a German show debating Hitler’s merits?” asked Yan Ratchinsky of Memorial, which has done more than any other organization to document Soviet abuses. Speaking in Memorial’s old redbrick building several blocks from Moscow’s once feared police headquarters, Ratchinsky told me Liubomov’s program would have been “fine” in democratic countries, where archives are open and history’s problems are freely discussed. “But Russia’s not that kind of country,” he observed. The show helped glorify the state, he said, by perpetuating the official view of history as a string of great victories under strong leaders. Putin’s administration encouraged that line, he added, because it helped convince citizen masses that they have no influence on the will of the state. “The only thing left for them to do,” he said, “is to hope for a good tsar.”

After dozens of years compiling files on victims of Soviet repression, Memorial’s directors estimate that completing the task will take six to eight more decades at their current rate, which official obstruction is slowing. Once a year, some of the group’s members assemble outside Lubyanka, the KGB’s forbidding old headquarters in central Moscow, to read the names of people the Soviet authorities shot. The organization’s chairman, a venerated former dissident named Arseniy Roginsky, who served four years in the Gulag in the 1980s, told me the exercise was necessary because the city that brimmed with monuments marking Soviet achievements in war and science lacked a single official memorial for victims of the communist era. Since reminders of the country’s bloody past undermined Russia’s new official identity, he said, the vast majority of Soviet archives, including informers’ names, remain secret, and only a quarter of the USSR’s mass grave sites are known.

Unlike postwar Germany, the Russian government never acknowledged the previous regime’s crimes, Roginsky continued, because Communist Party officials remained in power after 1991. “After all,” he said, “Moscow wasn’t conquered by enemy forces; Yeltsin was a Politburo member. Unlike other former Soviet republics, we couldn’t blame outsiders and collaborators. We cooked up the Soviet system ourselves and we must judge it ourselves, for which our leaders simply don’t have the political will.”

The failure to acknowledge Soviet crimes also pained the man most responsible for ending the USSR. Although Mikhail Gorbachev has steadfastly maintained that Russia would have been better off if communism hadn’t collapsed—despite his central role in the process—he worried that his place in Soviet history was being “written out” of school textbooks. Very much at ease in his role of elder statesman, the aging politician supported Putin for many years after he began systematically undermining the country’s democratic institutions—in order to preserve his status as head of his Gorbachev Foundation, some believed. However, at a conference in the organization’s late-Soviet-era brick building, he pontificated that “a new history is being created, one in which Stalin’s rule is seen as a golden age, Khrushchev’s as utopia and Brezhnev’s as a continuation of that golden age. None of that is happening accidentally.”

But beneath the surface of Kremlin controls and its elaborate show of purpose and unity, the government has shown itself to be fragile by Western standards, as I’ve mentioned—even when its power appeared huge and menacing. Putin’s current project has undermined Russia’s stability not only by failing to draw elementary lessons from its own history but also by encouraging nationalist attitudes that have fueled racism, xenophobia and a rising wave of violence against minorities that, in the same old cycle, ultimately threaten the Kremlin’s grip on power.

An old saying has it that while no one anywhere can divine the future, Russia is the only country with an unpredictable past. Rather than grapple with history’s difficulties, its leaders, like many of their predecessors, have attempted to forge a new ideology from a schizophrenic pastiche of symbols from tsarist as well as Soviet history that have been lifted out of context for the purpose of legitimizing their own rule. Even the most prominent Soviet critic, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is praised by the leaders who laud the great achievements of the regime he reviled. At the same time, virtually nothing is said about the immense cost of the vast projects—such as building cities from scratch and invading Afghanistan—launched at great sacrifice in the sprees of searching for The Solution to Everything: megamessianic undertakings, many of which ended in failure, destruction and death.

Grandiose projects have played a central role in Russian history and identity since the launching of the greatest tsarist architectural feat in 1703. Built largely by forced serf labor on marshland beside the Gulf of Finland, the city of St. Petersburg represented an immense act of will. Peter the Great wanted the capital moved from Moscow to a port closer to the rest of Europe, mainly so it could serve as a bulwark against the Swedish Empire, which had dominated the Baltic Sea for centuries. By the time the Peter and Paul Fortress was completed, however, Peter had vanquished the Swedes, who no longer posed a threat to his new capital. Subsequent rulers expanded it along a plan of radial streets whose rational layout was meant to display the reach of the tsar’s empire. Up went ornate, sometimes outlandishly decorated baroque buildings, many conceived by Italian architects, most prominently Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who designed the fabulous Winter Palace.

But if building St. Petersburg represented an all-out bid to create a European city, as many suppose, the project missed the mark in at least one telling respect. Whereas most capitals developed over centuries from small settlements to include layers of Romanesque, Gothic and baroque architecture, Russia’s new metropolis was distinctly different. It represented Europe at a single stage of its development, with a distinctly un-European uniformity that remains a monument to the Russian penchant for using foreign forms for its own purposes and characteristic creations.

The new capital provoked extreme reactions. Alexander Herzen described it as having no history, Western or Russian—a place where nothing was original. Myths filled the vacuum, starting with apocryphal folktales about floods and other forces of nature avenging the creation of a foreign city whose granite banks straitjacketed the water flowing through its canals. Pushkin drew on those themes to give St. Petersburg its central literary work. His 1833 epic poem “The Bronze Horseman” describes a statue of Peter on horseback by the French sculptor Étienne Falconet. Erected by Catherine the Great, it depicts his mount rearing above the snake of treason next to a malevolent Neva River.

November’s breath of autumn cold;

And Neva with her boisterous billow

Splashed on her shapely bounding-wall

And tossed in restless rise and fall

Like a sick man upon his pillow.¹

The poem follows the story of a young clerk named Yevgeny, whose betrothed is swept away during the great flood of 1824. Driven to madness, he threatens the statue, then imagines it coming to life to pursue him through the city in a narrative that immortalized the image of Peter as a symbol of ruthless will. It established the tension between his creation’s grand facades and nature’s dark forces as a major literary theme.

Although “The Bronze Horseman” depicts Peter’s vision for the city as a “window on the West,” Pushkin didn’t invent the metaphor. As the Harvard literary scholar Julie Buckler has argued, a nobleman first used it in a 1739 letter in which he described St. Petersburg as something very different from a conduit to Europe: a shop window. With the city representing all of Europe inside Russia, according to that logic, Russians had no need to go to the West. There it was, on display for them in St. Petersburg.

The earlier understanding of “window” lies closer to another metaphor that later came to describe the city: a theatrical stage. The Marquis de Custine, among others, described St. Petersburgers as actors. “I do not blame the Russians for being what they are,” he wrote.

I blame them for pretending what we are… In Petersburg everything has an air of opulence, grandeur, magnificence; but if you judge reality by this appearance, you will find yourself strangely deceived. Ordinarily the first effect of civilization is to make material life easy; here everything is difficult; crafty indifference is the secret of the life of the great majority.²

St. Petersburg’s deceptive image reflects the importance of fiction for running the huge empire that could barely keep an infrastructure in place. The need to maintain an appearance of order enhanced the perception of theatricality and artifice. In that way, in the primacy of its facade, the city that is usually seen as a foreign plant on Russian soil is actually quintessentially Russian. Ironically, the new capital’s perception as alien to Russia’s true nature became integral to its culture. Moscow continued to represent Russia’s big heart: a sprawling, seething, overgrown village that Gogol compared to an old housewife cooking blini. By contrast, St. Petersburg was German—meticulous and narcissistic.³

Cracks in its facade—seedy dark alleys, grinding poverty and the hyper-obsession with rank and groveling outward obedience against which Dostoevsky’s protagonist rails in his seminal Notes from Underground—also undermined its grandeur. Petersburg, a 1913 Symbolist novel by a highly intellectual writer named Andrei Bely, provided one of the ultimate expressions of those dark themes. It follows a wealthy young revolutionary ordered to assassinate his father, a high tsarist official. An assemblage of fragments and references that describes a surreal city of double agents, chaos and paranoia, the book portrays the wrenching social changes brought about by the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the early twentieth century. Apocalyptic visions from the St. Petersburg tradition appear on almost every page, including historical and fictional characters from “The Bronze Horseman,” Dostoevsky’s underground man, and Gogolian overcoats and noses.

After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks transformed St. Petersburg’s symbolic role by returning the capital to Moscow. Deprived of its official function, the theatrical stage became a museum. After more than a million inhabitants died during the Nazi blockade in World War II, mostly from starvation, the city was rebuilt, then saved from the ruin of Soviet development largely by neglect. The poet Joseph Brodsky saw his native city as a cultural vessel.

I must say that from these façades and porticoes—classical, modern, eclectic, with their columns, pilasters, and plastered heads of mythic animals or people—from their ornaments and caryatids holding up the balconies, from the torsos in the niches of their entrances, I have learned more about the history of our world than I have subsequently from any book.⁴

Crime-ridden and very poor compared to Moscow—roughly a quarter of the population stills inhabits communal apartments—St. Petersburg remains very different in its core and spirit. Rarely able to fully relax in the seething capital, I took the overnight train as often as I could for therapeutic strolls along St. Petersburg’s stunning canals and in its down-at-the-heels gardens. It was especially appealing during the white nights season in late June, when the sun never fully sets and the glee of young residents carousing on the streets until early dawn becomes infectious.

Finally, however, New Russia’s oil money began trickling down to the former capital, threatening its architectural unity with Kremlin plans to relocate various state agencies there. Poorly regulated new construction by developers who began pushing residents from the city center in order to illegally rebuild or simply raze old homes has been more destructive. Although many buildings are protected by law, a prominent historian and preservationist named Alexander Margolis believes few are safe. “Under our style of capitalism,” Margolis said to me in despair, “developers bribe officials to condemn sound buildings and allow them to build whatever they want. It’s not clear how much of the old St. Petersburg will survive.” Meanwhile, the city retains its old role in the national consciousness, at least for now. The head of the Moscow Architectural Institute, a scholar named Vyacheslav Glazychev, told me it has helped preserve a “natural Europeanism” that remains a strong antithesis to the rest of Russia. “I always talk about a binary pattern,” he said. “That means two capitals of Russia, not just Moscow.”

If St. Petersburg is the product of a unified vision, Moscow is a cacophony of conflicting, unfinished projects. As Muscovites themselves like to point out, their city, despite its estimated thirteen million residents, retains the feel of a provincial village whose various parts reflect different priorities and ideologies. Large swaths of Moscow’s mostly nineteenth-century neighborhoods were bulldozed as part of the communist aim of building a model socialist metropolis with broad avenues of totalitarian grandiosity. The seven so-called Stalin skyscrapers, massive neo-Gothic edifices looming over their districts, are the most visible fruits of that effort. But the project progressed in fits and starts. Stalin’s tastes fluctuated and war interrupted construction before his death in 1953. While the heavy neoclassical Stalinist structures, with their austere pillars and spires, still dominate a number of thoroughfares—including Tverskaya Street, a kind of main drag—pre-Revolutionary Art Nouveau and baroque buildings still provide welcome contrasts.

Khrushchev later imposed a cut-rate, glass-and-concrete vision of modernity. The best examples—on a sprawling, impersonal street called Novy Arbat, roughly parallel to Tverskaya—were outdated even before their completion, although those efforts are luxurious compared to the brutalist concrete-panel eyesores that went up almost everywhere else. But even their construction had virtually halted in the decaying city by 1991.

The subsequent capitalist boom brought new layers of eclectic, mostly garish new office and apartment buildings built during a construction spree tightly controlled by former Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who combined free-market economics with a Soviet command-style administration that micromanaged most aspects of city life until his ouster in 2011. Luzhkov was also among the first post-Soviet politicians to begin appropriating symbols from Russia’s past to glorify his rule.

The Christ the Savior cathedral, the world’s largest Russian Orthodox church, was among his most ambitious projects. First constructed in the late nineteenth century to mark the victory over Napoleon in 1812, it was dynamited in the 1930s to make way for a colossal Palace of Soviets that was never built. The site eventually housed a giant outdoor swimming pool until Luzhkov commissioned the construction of a copy of the original cathedral. The gaudy new version, a symbol of Russia’s supposed spiritual rebirth after seventy years of communism, was decorated by Luzhkov’s “court artist,” a Georgian named Zurab Tseretelli. Luzhkov also had Tseretelli design an underground shopping mall in Manezh Square, adjacent to the more famous Red Square, where garish, cloying statuettes of characters from Russian fables decorate a set of fountains. Tseretelli’s contribution to the city’s Victory Park, which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, include a gargantuan spire that can be seen for miles.

However, Tseretelli’s most controversial work is a towering statue dominating a central bend of the Moscow River. Erected to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the Russian navy, it shows Peter the Great standing on a supposedly eighteenth-century ship whose above-deck structure consists of St. Petersburg buildings. Whether its many levels of historical nonsense were intentionally or unwittingly ironic, the twenty-five-million-dollar structure is a mountain of bad taste. Ignoring St. Petersburg’s artificiality and the seeming contradictions of Peter’s image—paradox itself being a dominant feature of the national character—Tseretelli’s take on the Bronze Horseman sculpture was an odd choice for Moscow. Luzhkov, whose chief interest was surely underscoring his power, made nonsense of the sea, Russia’s infant navy and everything that linked Peter to St. Petersburg as few people have ever been to any city.

Around the same time, Boris Yeltsin commissioned committees of scholars for a much-derided attempt to develop a “national idea” that would help fill the ideological void left by the disappearance of communism. But it was Luzhkov who set the tone for what would come later by harking back to tsarist history, including by occasionally dressing himself up in a knight’s costume to portray Yuri Dolgoruki, Moscow’s supposed twelfth-century founder. It’s no accident, as the Marxists used to say, that Stalin erected a statue to the same warrior outside what is now the city hall. The Soviet dictator often appealed to Russia’s sense of patriotism by way of its history, especially after the onset of World War II. Trying to do the same, Luzhkov later provoked controversy during a failed attempt to erect billboards depicting Stalin in honor of the Soviet victory over the Nazis.

Putin has since taken the lead in adopting symbols from pre-Revolutionary and communist history to generate a nostalgia-fogged vision of Russian identity that has helped camouflage the nature of his rule. He appropriated the music for the Stalin-era Soviet anthem for Russia’s use and—a mere week after having announced that Russia had “no elements” of Stalinism—introduced a Hero of Labor award, another relic that first appeared under Stalin as the Hero of Socialist Labor. The president also likes to compare himself to earlier doers such as the ruthless Stolypin, Nicholas II’s prime minister, whom Russians remember today less for introducing his important land reforms than for inspiring “Stolypin wagons,” a type of train car that still carries inmates to Siberian penal colonies. Putin has also invoked Prince Alexander Gorchakov, one of Russia’s most respected foreign ministers, whom he quoted in the title of his 2012 election manifesto, Russia Is Concentrating, an allusion to the country’s renewal following its devastating defeat in the Crimean War in 1856. Revealing his vision of democracy in another publication, Putin said Russia had no need of “the circus of various candidates competing with each other to give more and more unrealistic promises.” Purporting to criticize his opponents, the harangue was startling for its description, again intentional or unwitting, of his own system of elaborate pretense.

We don’t need a situation where all that is left of democracy is the facade, where democracy is understood as a one-time entertaining political show and a candidates’ casting call, where substance is forgotten for the sake of shocking statements and mutual accusations, where real politics is reduced to shady deals and decisions made behind the scenes but never discussed with voters. We should avoid that blind alley.

Putin’s projects have been as remarkable for their hollowness as for anything else. As Europeans debated the EU’s future amid the euro crisis in 2011, he proposed a new alliance that would resurrect a form of the Soviet Union by bringing its former member states into a “Eurasian Union.” This one would be bound not by ideology but trade, building on an existing customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan that Putin has described as “the most important geopolitical integration in the post-Soviet space since the breakup of the Soviet Union.” Having done as much as anyone to stifle regional economic cooperation by banning goods imported from Georgia and Moldova and cutting off gas to Ukraine, Putin now voiced hope that the union would supersede the Commonwealth of Independent States, a toothless alliance of eleven of the original fifteen Soviet republics.

The new plan evokes Eurasianism, a hard-line nationalist movement conceived by 1920s émigrés who believed Russia to be closer to Asia than to Europe. Resurrected in the 1980s, it has recently been led by Alexander Dugin, a strident ideologue who envisions a strategic bloc that would join the former Soviet Union to Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, in order to rival the American-led Euro-Atlantic alliance. It fits well with Putin’s oft-invoked “multipolar” world order—as opposed to the “unipolar” US-led version—although rather than building international institutions, his main goal is strengthening Russian power. Whereas the communists distributed cheap oil, gas and other subsidies as a way of bribing allies and clients, Putin has engaged in hard-nosed bargaining aimed at increasing Moscow’s influence and has issued credit to countries such as Belarus, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, which have been willing to buy Russian commodities in return for ceding control over pipelines and other infrastructure.

In a 2013 apologia for Putin published in the Financial Times that had all the hallmarks of official propaganda, Dugin explained that having been abandoned by the liberal elite during the recent mass protests, the president was now following his true beliefs by becoming a Russian “conservative modernizer” who would save the homeland from a “single, encroaching world order.”⁵ Comparing Putin to a pantheon composed of Peter the Great, Stalin, Lenin and Ivan the Terrible, Dugin said his mandate was his appeal to the Russian masses and that his actions represented a “rethinking of what comes at the end of the transition” from communism. “Having lost the cold war,” Dugin wrote, “Russia will try to revise the status quo using all available opportunities.”

Some see Eurasianism’s rhetoric as a salve for the trauma of the communist collapse. As Richard Pipes has argued, countries such as England and France, which had created national states before forming overseas empires, found it easier to deal with the end of colonialism. The Russian nation-state, by contrast, developed concurrently with an empire it directly bordered. “As a result, the loss of empire caused confusion in the Russians’ sense of national identity,” he wrote. “They have great difficulty acknowledging that Ukraine, the cradle of their state, is now a sovereign republic and fantasize about the day when it will reunite with Mother Russia.”⁶

Without Ukraine, moreover, the largest market for Russian exports, Moscow can have no real hope of establishing the Eurasian Union. So when Kiev was preparing to sign major agreements with the EU—a possible step toward eventual membership—in late 2013, Moscow issued an ultimatum that it couldn’t choose both and threatened economic sanctions. Russia’s anger had the effect only of hardening Ukraine’s resolve to sign the EU deals.

Even more damaging for its interests, the Kremlin has been hard at work squandering its greatest instrument of influence, the Russian language. Picking fights with Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia and other former Soviet republics—whose populations, subjected to Russification sometimes for centuries, have spoken the language as a second mother tongue—has encouraged them to want to forget Russian. Some three hundred million people spoke the language in 1990, but it’s projected that only half that number will speak it by 2025 as former colonies cement their own national identities by focusing on their native languages.

Putin’s grand visions include doubling Moscow’s size to alleviate its mind-numbing traffic jams and rebuilding Sochi for the Olympics. In that gaudy symbol of postcommunist Russia, where moneyed vacationers go to swim in the murky sea or ski in the Caucasus Mountains, prices are as high as New York’s. Like Peter the Great in his day, Putin has coerced billionaire businessmen into supporting the undertaking. One built a new airport and a seaport; another dropped two billion dollars into the nearby mountain resort.⁷ Putin farmed out another scheme, building a Russian Silicon Valley in a suburb called Skolkovo, to Medvedev. Dismissing those plans as fantasy, Vedomosti, a leading business daily, wrote that “the way [the authorities] speak, they are practically past accomplishments, and it would seem that Russia should share its successful experience of modernization with all backward countries still struggling to develop.”

“In the Kremlin’s imaginary utopian world,” the paper continued with more than a little irony, “Russia is already the core of a powerful regional alliance stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. That union is a force with which the whole world must reckon, especially because the Russian military will be armed with cutting-edge technology and weapons and will overwhelm the entire world.”

Britain was only just establishing its empire when Alexis de Tocqueville famously predicted that two relatively unnoticed countries of the time would one day compete for world domination. Russia and America, he wrote in Democracy in America, published in 1835, would follow different paths to become great powers. “The principal instrument of the former is freedom,” he argued, “of the latter, servitude.” Each “seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

Almost two centuries later, Russians and Americans are often likened to each other for their informality, easy hospitality and other qualities less frequently encountered in the more stratified European societies. They are also similar for their attachment to reinvention as a cultural theme, although in very different if not opposite ways. The American dream includes escaping the past and its European roots. Russians dream of being respected in Europe if not accepted as part of it. It bears repetition that Russian culture tends to be reactive in the sense of borrowing Western ideas and transforming them to fit native patterns and conceptions. Some ideas are inventive and original, such as the culture magazine Openspace.ru and the television channel Dozhd—Internet sites that are lively reminders of the 1990s, when media outlets were raw and vital. However, most initiatives are anything but.

Among them, Putin’s project to cast Russia as a great power has heavily relied on good old-fashioned nationalism. No different from other varieties, which seek to create an imaginary community of “us” against “them,” the Russian version is also anchored on the perception of a past injustice. It’s no accident that after a decade of Russian flirtation with the West, the United States is again chief among villains. Moscow’s imagined rivalry with the world’s most powerful country not only encourages fond memories of Soviet might but also enables the Kremlin to punch above its weight on the world stage.

Although some foreign policy experts maintain Putin genuinely wanted to ally with Washington following September 11—not least in order to justify the conflict in Chechnya as part of the global “war on terror”—anti-Americanism has been part and parcel of his stance from the beginning. In regular barrages, he has charged Washington with spreading violence and extremism around the world and with seeking to foment discontent in Russia in order to weaken and even dismember it, then steal its natural resources. He once compared American foreign policy to Nazi Germany’s, saying “new threats” in the world, “as during the Third Reich, contain the same contempt for human life and same claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world.” He also accused Washington of encouraging Georgia to attack its pro-Moscow breakaway region of South Ossetia, which purportedly prompted Russia’s invasion in 2008.

Putin has made some of his accusations on Russia Today, the three-hundred-million-dollar-a-year English-language satellite channel founded in 2008 to broadcast the Kremlin’s views, often in the form of denunciations of American imperialism and greed and other supposed signs of Western decline. In a 2013 interview in which he publicly offered political asylum to Edward Snowden—the ex-CIA whistle-blower soon after granted temporary refuge in Russia—he went on to criticize the United States for being founded on the “ethnic cleansing” of its native population and for using the atomic bomb on Japan, which he insisted even Stalin wouldn’t have considered.

Choosing George W. Bush’s scheme for a missile defense system as its main bugbear, the Kremlin objected most strongly to plans for stationing a radar system in the Czech Republic and ten missile interceptors in Poland, two former Soviet Bloc countries. Although Washington affirmed that the rankling installations were directed against Iran and North Korea, Moscow insisted their real purpose was to neutralize Russia’s nuclear weapons deterrent, its intercontinental ballistic missiles. Never mind that the ranges of American interceptors are too short to threaten Russia’s missiles during any time in flight and therefore pose no threat to Moscow’s nuclear deterrence. Or that experts ridiculed Bush’s plans to deploy untested radar technology. Putin threatened to retaliate by directing nuclear missiles at Europe. For the first time since the Cold War, he also resumed international bomber sorties on aging Soviet-era aircraft and sent naval ships to South America.

For all Medvedev’s supposed liberalism, he picked up Putin’s mantle by greeting Barack Obama’s election victory in 2008 with a threat. As congratulations were pouring in from around the world, the then–Russian president labeled American policies “egotistical and dangerous” in a state of the nation speech delivered in front of top officials gathered in a massive Kremlin hall. Lashing out against the missile defense plans, Medvedev said Moscow would be forced to respond by stationing new missiles of its own near Poland, something even the Soviet Union had refrained from risking. The message—that any expectations that the new US administration would have an easier time dealing with the Kremlin were misguided—was the latest in a string of rants that moved Moscow’s relations with Washington back toward Cold War lows.

Celebrations marking Victory in Europe Day have seemed to grow longer and larger—and the trumpeting of the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany as evidence of Russian greatness ever louder—every year since Putin’s ascendance, even after he revived the Soviet tradition of driving tanks and missiles across Red Square during the annual military parade. American children barely register the date, if at all, but their Russian counterparts are incessantly reminded of that supposedly central part of their national identity in a fashion very much in the mold of the constant Soviet advertising for one or another glorious anniversary of the Revolution. The practice of decorating car antennas and door handles with orange-and-black striped ribbons—called the St. George’s Ribbon, which adorns military medals—became widespread at roughly the same time.

Although the Kremlin toned down its rhetoric after Obama canceled the missile-shield installation in the Czech Republic, it continued to threaten retaliation against the new scheme. Seeking to undermine the Kremlin’s so-called zero-sum view of foreign policy—the idea that a benefit for one side necessarily constitutes a loss for the other—the White House’s top Russia adviser, Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor appointed to the National Security Council, led an attempt to engage Russia with a nuanced “reset” program of cooperation on mutually beneficial issues. The realist approach facilitated the signing of a nuclear weapons treaty and a significant boosting of diplomatic ties on various bureaucratic levels. But after the scholar—who advocates democratization in Russia and other countries—was appointed ambassador to Russia in 2011, he was greeted in Moscow with a withering attack on state television that accused him of seeking to overthrow the government. Alluding to the Soviet use of secret sleeper agents, Putin chimed in by blaming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for orchestrating that year’s public protests against him. She set their tone, he said. “They heard the signal and started active work.”

The government ordered the US Agency for International Development to shut down its Russia operations soon afterward for what the Kremlin characterized as meddling in its internal affairs. Some of Russia’s most active civil-society groups, which Putin once characterized as “Judases,” were among beneficiaries of the fifty million dollars that USAID distributed in Russia each year. They included Memorial and Golos, the vote-monitoring group whose thousands of volunteers played a central role in documenting the mass fraud during the parliamentary elections of 2011. A foreign ministry spokesman explained that the American funding had sought to “influence the political process, including elections at various levels, and civil society.” During the first parliamentary hearing on US human rights abuses since the Soviet collapse, lawmakers used the opportunity to lash out against the United States again by criticizing Americans for waterboarding, abusing children and issuing “anti-Russian propaganda.”

Responding to criticism about such rhetoric, Putin said he regularly followed public opinion polls to ensure he understood the opinions of “not just the intelligentsia, which I respect, but also the native Russians.” Such nationalistic fantasy, which pits “us” true Russians against a group of malevolent “others”—a lumping together of intellectuals, opposition leaders and foreigners—is aimed at redirecting public anger over a government unable to address the country’s widespread poverty, corruption and mounting predictions of economic downturn because its overarching concern is with preserving Putin’s power.

Not to be outdone, a new parliament convened in January of 2013 to propose a list of initiatives to curb foreign influences in Russia, an absurd surge of patriotism meant as a display of loyalty during increasingly repressive times. Having recently banned adoptions of children by Americans, legislators proposed a complete ban on all foreign adoptions, along with a requirement that Russian officials who have children studying abroad lose their posts if their offspring fail to return to Russia immediately afterward. Another initiative would have barred them from studying abroad at all. Other proposals included a bill to prevent foreigners, as well as Russians with dual citizenship, from criticizing the government on television and a bill forbidding officials to marry foreigners from countries outside the former USSR.⁸ No such measures were ultimately adopted.

If legislators believed their zeal would protect them from the president’s mounting anti-Western campaign, however, they were mistaken. After pledging that the country would “de-offshorize” its economy, Putin sent them a bill banning officials from holding bank accounts abroad and investing in foreign government debt. A provision outlawing the ownership of any property abroad was toned down to stipulate only that foreign assets be declared, an alarming prospect nevertheless for an elite whose ownership of foreign property is legion. “Managing a foreign property without a foreign bank account is hardly possible,” wrote a young opposition legislator named Ilya Ponomaryov. “But that’s the whole point of the new legislation: to turn more people into criminals.”⁹

Alexei Navalny leaped at the opportunity by publicizing revelations that no less a figure than the head of the Duma’s ethics committee, a United Russia founder, had failed to declare apartments and other property in Miami Beach worth more than two million dollars. Although Vladimir Pekhtin initially dismissed the allegation as “unmerited,” he was soon forced to resign by colleagues who were worried that his denial would expose the party to a public backlash. The standing ovation in parliament he received on leaving no doubt reflected relief instead of the supposed restoration of respect for political morality for which he was lauded. That would have been premature. Another United Russia member deputy, a billionaire, soon also resigned, for “health reasons,” and Navalny continued helping expose other United Russia leaders—lawmakers, governors and others—as “liars and hypocrites” by publishing their patriotic-sounding public statements denouncing corruption and the West next to foreign property registration documents and Google Maps photos of their luxurious villas on the Riviera and other holiday destinations.

No one could have seriously believed the party purges represented a real opposition victory, however. The applause for Pekhtin was closer to the standing ovations Stalin received from Communist Party leaders quaking in their boots. If Putin’s rule had been relatively benign for loyal members of the elite, it was now becoming dangerous even for them. The new campaign, which included a presidential decree ordering more than a million officials to declare their expenses as well as their income and assets, did much to reestablish the traditional threat of arbitrary punishment that had attained its most extreme form under the totalitarian dictator. However, the new version was much closer to the more predictable Brezhnev system, under which the Party kept some of its corruption in check by punishing those who stole too much. It gave Putin even more leverage over the globe-trotting elite while making a show of cracking down on their excesses and doing ever more to further his drive to isolate Russia from the West. Taken together, such recent actions have pushed the Putin system of rule toward fully formed maturity.

In other quarters, the anti-Western feeling that has ebbed and flowed in Russia over centuries has diminished since foreign travel and uncensored Internet use made the West available to the Russian people for the first time ever. But while popular sentiments continue to be shaped and channeled from above, a wellspring of nationalism has risen from the grassroots, perhaps also for the first time in the country’s history—and it is complicating our understanding of its society. For example, a Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2012 reported that only 31 percent of respondents were satisfied with how democracy was working in Russia—an indication that more and more Russians recognize a gap between democratic values and their perception of Russian reality. Nevertheless, 72 percent of those same people said they held a favorable opinion of Putin. It’s probably no coincidence that 73 percent believed Russia deserves more respect in the world.

The most intense hatred of Americans I’ve witnessed in Moscow had come a dozen years earlier, in the backlash to NATO’s bombing of Serbia. The desire for revenge it prompted was mixed with admiration, envy and feelings of rivalry that came partly from an older, collective sense of inferiority and shame for Russia’s backwardness and place in the world. To put it crudely, people’s first unfettered look at the outside world during the 1990s made them realize that mammoth reforms were required for genuine competition, and it activated an easy excuse for why they weren’t undertaken. It was a short jump from “we’re different” to “we’re better!”

Within a few years, I began noticing fewer Russians at parties given by foreigners and fewer foreigners at Russian parties. By 2005, the trend was unmistakable. Although troubling, the de facto segregation lightened the atmosphere among fellow Americans by enabling us to speak more freely because things had become stickier in mixed company. Instead of being able to bemoan local and national problems with sympathetic Russian friends, I found myself watching my words for fear of appearing to insult their country.

Even many young people, including those in their teens and twenties who were studying foreign languages and had traveled abroad, shared Putin’s near-xenophobic chauvinism. A visit to an eleventh-grade history class at one of Moscow’s most prestigious schools shortly after Obama’s election seemed typical in that way. A friendly, well-spoken student named Dima Osafkin condemned the United States for meddling in the affairs of other countries. “America has pursued anti-Russian policies in Georgia and other former Soviet countries on our border,” he told me without rancor. “That’s unfair, and we don’t like it.” A classmate named Danil Kuznetsov said Medvedev was right to threaten to deploy new missiles. “It wasn’t just tied to the American election. It was a smart move because the United States has been surrounding us with its own missile bases.”

Widespread suspicion of the United States troubled Georgy Mirsky, a veteran foreign affairs specialist. Apart from the intelligentsia and urban middle classes, “our people are much more nationalistic, chauvinistic and antidemocratic than Putin himself,” he told me. “So the current regime is by no means the worst we could have.” Mirsky said that unlike the masses, however, Russia’s political elite—whose members continue to regularly travel to the United States, send their children to study in British and American universities and still keep their money in foreign bank accounts despite Putin’s anti-Western campaign—doesn’t hold store in its own propaganda.

He believed the elite exploited popular anti-American feeling in order to blame the United States for Russia’s problems. “Who could be a better scapegoat?” he asked. If there was Marxism-Leninism under the Soviet Union, the eminent scholar concluded, “Russia’s ersatz ideology today is patriotism. And it’s interchangeable with anti-Americanism.”

In the 1990s, reporters could call on any number of liberal Duma deputies for interviews. Even high-ranking officials of Yeltsin’s administration such as Boris Nemtsov and other young reformers were sometimes willing to shed light on how the government carried out its decisions. And while it was easy to dismiss their main opponents—the communists who controlled parliament—as retrograde obstructionists, even they could be enlightening. Although one of their leaders, a former Soviet prosecutor named Victor Ilyukhin—who led an effort to impeach Yeltsin on charges of genocide against Russians and helping to end communism—sometimes appeared to embody the party’s worst aspects, he spoke intelligently, with empathy for his electorate, and appeared to be trying to do the right thing by them in his own way.

Putin’s rise caused almost instantaneous change. During the rare instances they agreed to engage, officials reverted to Soviet-like stoniness they sometimes leavened with saccharine, paternalistic manners. I resorted to gleaning scraps of information about attitudes among the great and good in government during lunches and other informal meetings with one or another of a small handful of low-and middle-level officials I knew. Otherwise, Moscow bureaucrats generally took their cues from the president, whom I once questioned during one of his annual news conferences, held in front of a thousand-plus journalists crammed into an aging Kremlin auditorium. I asked him to explain a recent rant of his about foreign countries he had accused of seeking to portray Russia as an enemy. “Do they include Washington and London?” I inquired. “Otherwise who specifically do you believe wants to damage Russia’s image?” Since I’d submitted a different question to his spokesman a week in advance, Putin’s answer wasn’t entirely unprepared. Having been late to join the hours-long line to get into the auditorium, however, I found myself sitting on a distant balcony beside a powerful stage light that obscured the view of me from the stage below. Ignoring the frantic hand-waving of more visible reporters next to me, the moderator managed to pick me out.

Putin adapted his answer with the menace he often reserves for foreign journalists. “There’s a dishonest attitude to the interpretation of events,” he lectured, glaring up in my direction. “That’s the work of Russia’s ill-wishers. If you write those kinds of things, you’re among their number.” Uncomfortable as it made me feel, I found his response instructive for appearing to confirm that the news conference had been choreographed to appear spontaneous while enabling Putin to control his responses.

Although I found that and other aspects of reporting in Russia similar to what had been required under Soviet rule—for example, having to ignore loathsome officials’ anti-American barbs for the sake of opening doors for important interviews—nothing I experienced approached the games my father had to play to remain in good enough standing to be allowed to visit the USSR.

Fiercely critical of the Communist Party authorities as he was, he never shared the common Western impression of the Soviet Union as little more than one big labor camp. The topics he covered, mostly involving people’s lives and thoughts beyond politics, enabled him to describe some of the “normal” and even positive aspects of life, from ballet to mushroom picking. Therefore he was taken aback and a little hurt when an especially plodding Soviet publication called Molodoi Kommunist (“young communist”) ran a scathing denunciation of him. Rashly deciding to complain, he visited the journal’s editorial office, where the staff had no idea what to make of him and his protest. Seemingly chastened, however, the editors asked him to return for lunch several days later, apparently to get rid of him before reporting the incident to higher authorities. At the lunch, which was typically grand for a semiofficial occasion, the friendly as well as apologetic editors suggested more mutual understanding could be achieved in a second, smaller meeting. Toward the middle of a third lunch, supposedly a heart-to-heart with a single man who hadn’t been present at the previous meals, it dawned on George that the man was no editor but a KGB officer.

More invitations followed, usually to the upscale Aragvi restaurant, which was known to serve the KGB as a kind of listening post and reception place for foreign visitors. Its private rooms were perfect for bugging conversations. “My flesh crawled the minute I saw him,” George recalled. “But I assumed he had the power to have me kicked out of the country and prevented from returning, so I had to be very careful.” Short and stubby, with an ugly, glowering stare and a country accent of which he was ashamed, Bastard, as George silently called the man, oozed envy of Western freedom and privileges even when he was spouting Marxist-Leninist slogans and pressuring his “guest” to “join the struggle for world peace” by supplying information about his fellow Americans. George had to walk a very thin line between pretending he’d be willing to do that one day and saying nothing that could be used to blackmail him. Despite the liters of vodka the Bastard downed on the KGB’s expense account, he sobered up the instant his prey slipped enough to utter something that might have been construed as anti-Soviet.

The KGB officer—who, my father later learned, indeed had the power of admitting and expelling him—“made life a thousand times easier” by not calling him during several reportorial trips to Moscow from his base in London. But his luck ran out when he went to research his biography of Solzhenitsyn, by far the most powerful Soviet dissent of the time. Returning from an interview with one of Solzhenitsyn’s closest Gulag friends to his room in the Rossiya Hotel, a brutalist box next to Red Square, George was shocked to find Bastard sitting on the edge of a chair, his fury “enough to burn a hole in the door.” After years of George’s game of being a friend of the Soviet Union, “now he’d obviously found out I was gathering material about Solzhenitsyn, meaning I’d double-crossed him. No doubt that was a blow to his personal standing. After all that work he’d done on me, what would his bosses think of him?”

He shouted that the road was now “closed” to George. “Entry to the Soviet Union is forbidden to you!” In his nervousness, however, George mistook the word “entry” (vezd) for the very similar-sounding “exit” (vyezd).

“ ‘Holy shit,’ I thought. ‘I’m stuck in the Soviet Union for the rest of my life!’ No doubt I turned white, which is just what he wanted. He marched out, very satisfied,” my father recalled.

Nevertheless, George managed to return to Moscow ten years later. Arriving in early 1980, when the United States was boycotting the Moscow Winter Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the previous year, he noticed what appeared to be a remarkable new development about which he hadn’t read: many people, including the relatively straight and patriotic, had started complaining. Not about politics, which were rarely discussed openly, or about any high principle, but about the shortages of consumer goods, the low standard of living, the sense that society in general was no longer working. It was the start of a revolution of rising expectations and lowering hope that they’d ever be met—a revolution scarcely described in the West, where fear of the Soviet Union continued to dominate in the media. Although living standards had risen under Brezhnev, the Soviet people were increasingly aware of how poorly they lived compared to people in other countries, and they were sick of it. Returning to London, George published articles in the London Sunday Times and Harper’s Magazine describing Soviet society as “sick.”

I noticed something very similar about Russia when I returned to Moscow for a reporting trip in 2011 after more than a year away: everyone was complaining. No longer around their proverbial kitchen tables, as they did under communism, but in the sushi chains and fancy department stores that made life appear very different from the way it was in what my father likes to call his “day.” Before every taxi trip, I girded myself against harangues from the driver about how the greedy bastards at the top were stealing everything.

In another development that suggested similarities to Brezhnev’s USSR, a Levada Center poll conducted the same year revealed that 22 percent of adults wanted to leave the country for good—three times the number that had said so four years earlier and significantly more than the 18 percent who had said they wanted out as the waning USSR was spiraling toward dissolution in 1991. The poll surveyed people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine who lived in large cities and earned five to ten times the average income—i.e., the young middle-class people who would soon take to the streets to protest.

Authoritarianism was among the least of their concerns. What bothered them most of all were high prices, crime and corruption. Of course no one had liked those features of their lives earlier. The difference was their growing impatience with the stagnation behind the high-flown rhetoric, a sense that Putin’s imminent return meant that nothing would change for the foreseeable future.

The ever-stauncher nationalism Putin used to help weather the growing dissatisfaction fed the deep-rooted racism and xenophobia coursing just beneath the facade of a society that comprises more than 180 ethnic groups and is still grappling with the consequences of the Soviet collapse. Communism had once promised to wipe out national boundaries and ethnic distinctions. Actually, the imperialists in the Kremlin relied on a poorly defined Soviet “nationality” to veil the dominant Russian nationalism. A rhyme about Yuri Gagarin conveys the flavor of that racialist spirit.

Kak khorosho shto nash Gagarin

Ne Evrei i ne Tatarin

Ne Kalmyk i ne Uzbek

A nash Sovetskii chelovek!

(How good that our Gagarin

Isn’t a Jew or a Tatar

Not a Kalmyk or an Uzbek,

But a man of our own Soviet stock!)

Like American congressmen endlessly gerrymandering state districts, the Soviets drew and redrew national and regional boundaries to finesse their rule over territories, including the khanates and emirates of Central Asia, which formerly had no such borders. The practice fanned long-suppressed ethnic disputes that, when unleashed by the crumbling of communism, resulted in bloodshed and so-called frozen conflicts in former Soviet republics such as Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Although Russia remained remarkably cohesive following the Soviet collapse, bitter enmity broke out between its various neighbors, too, including the Ossetians and the Ingush in the Caucasus. Their brief war in North Ossetia in 1992 resulted in hundreds of deaths and the expulsion of sixty thousand Ingush, and simmering tensions still show no signs of abating. Ossetians venturing into Ingushetia, and the other way around, still say they risk beatings and murder. In late 2011, when I wanted to take a taxi from Nazran in Ingushetia to the nearest airport, half an hour away in North Ossetia, my driver agreed only under the condition that a police sergeant accompany us to insure against trouble. Although none occurred, I sensed mass violence could easily break out again if and when the Kremlin relaxes its draconian security measures.

The most prominent antagonists by far, however, are the white Slavic Russians who have joined the ranks of various nationalist groups since the 1980s. Among the politicians seeking their support who have long become fixtures on the political scene is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the clownish “ultranationalist” leader of the fiercely illiberal and utterly undemocratic Liberal Democratic Party, who once presented me with a bottle of Zhirinovsky brand aftershave, boasting that even the US president didn’t have his own line of toiletries.

Zhirinovsky and others have played on the dislike of millions of migrant workers who, during the past two decades, have streamed to various parts of Russia, especially Moscow, where they work on municipal sanitation crews and construction sites, providing very cheap labor for the building boom. Although an astounding 60 percent of Tajikistan’s working population is believed to live in Russia, migrants are rarely seen on the streets except when they’re sweeping them. Central Asians form part of a virtually segregated second class of residents who do the various kinds of dangerous, backbreaking work that most Russians reject.

During a visit I paid to the construction site of a typical updated Soviet-style residential block, Tajik workers, who slept on a rough concrete floor without access to running water or a working toilet, told me they earned the equivalent of eight hundred dollars a month—and that the police demanded bribes even though they had legal permits. “Tajiks in Moscow are slaves in the twenty-first century,” one soft-spoken worker named Said Chekhanov remarked. “We’re treated like animals. The police insult us, and our employers forbid us even to talk at work.”

Everyone at the construction site had stories of attacks by masked men in the middle of the night. Another Tajik I met, a timid twenty-eight-year-old named Sukhaili Saidov, described an assault outside the metro by five young men wielding knives. He escaped after being stabbed in his stomach. However, he said another attack, on a young Central Asian woman, haunted him more. “She was killed right in front of me,” he said. “Three men grabbed her outside the metro, where there were lots of people around. She was screaming, but the police did nothing. Then the men smashed her head with a brick.”

After suffering three attacks, Saidov was afraid to venture outside after dark, which cost him his job as a security guard. But he didn’t want to return to Tajikistan, where the average wage was around fifteen dollars a month. With work in Moscow enabling him to support ten family members back home, he decided to stay and look for another job.

Karomat Sharipov, the head of a support group for Tajiks, blamed greed for fueling racist attacks. “Construction companies are making huge sums of money,” he said. “And so are the authorities, who are secretly paid to help ‘organize’ the migrant labor system. Spreading fear is profitable for them.”

Although Putin has denounced racist attacks, he has also fanned the attitudes that animate them by exploiting nationalism for his political gain. During his first term as president, the Kremlin launched a nationalist party called Rodina (“Motherland”), partly to bleed communists of votes, before pulling the plug because Rodina’s leader, Dmitri Rogozin, was becoming genuinely popular. At its height, the party was banned from competing in Moscow’s municipal elections after broadcasting anti-immigrant advertisements urging “Let’s clean the city of garbage!” The aborted venture illustrated Putin’s attempt to walk a fine line between attracting nationalist voters and encouraging the virulent nationalism that has threatened to undermine his support.

The balancing act seemed to start unraveling in 2006, when locals in Karelia, a forested region next to Finland, attacked houses and businesses owned by Chechens and other Caucasus natives before running them out of town. I flew there a few days after the incident had raised alarm bells in Moscow. The backwater industrial town of Kondopoga, whose name is now a byword for racism, was hardly unusual in that Caucasus natives owned stores and restaurants there and ran the local market, many having fled economic collapse and instability back home. On its dusty main street, residents told me usually nothing happened there.

The violence began when several ethnic Russians celebrating their release from jail beat an Azerbaijani bartender after refusing to pay for their drinks. Witnesses told me the restaurant’s owner called in a group of Chechens wielding knives and clubs who attacked the Russians, killing two of them. The deaths prompted residents to call for the expulsion of Caucasus natives from Kondopoga. “They do whatever they want, act like they own everything,” a local named Victor Pavlov told me, echoing many others. “They’ve bribed our corrupt officials, bought out our stores and are dispossessing the Russian people.”

Activists from Moscow arrived to organize protests. Among them was Alexander Belov, a young member of parliament and extreme nationalist who heads a notorious and vocal group called the Movement Against Illegal Immigration. When two thousand protesters met to draw up a petition addressed to the local mayor, Belov called for all Caucasus natives to be expelled within twenty-four hours, although he later denied having incited the crowd. “I just said, ‘The land belongs to you Russians,’ ” he told me. “ ‘You’ve been robbed and that will soon be remedied.’ ” After the protest broke up, a mob of some two hundred mostly drunk young men rampaged through Kondopoga’s streets, throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at stores, restaurants and houses belonging to Chechens and other Caucasus natives. Roughly sixty people fled.

When I spoke to some of them in the gym of a nearby summer school, where they were under police protection, a middle-aged Chechen woman named Taisa Gazikhanova told me the rioters had threatened to kill them. “I was born here,” she declared. “Nevertheless the people I’ve lived around my whole life suddenly turned on us.” Her plight failed to impress Karelia’s governor, Sergei Katanandov, who told me he sympathized with unhappiness over what he called ostentatious displays of wealth. “Everything would be fine if new arrivals in our region respected our principles, our views about life,” he said. “And if they didn’t insult people with their behavior.”

Back in Moscow, Putin revealed his sympathies in language whose code wasn’t difficult to crack. The government, he said, had a duty to protect the “native population” from criminal groups “with an ethnic flavor” that control street markets. Then he proceeded to restore Soviet-era quotas on foreigners working in shops and markets. Alexander Verkhovsky, an expert on racism who runs Moscow’s Sova think tank, told me such behavior encouraged extremist violence. “What’s more, officials often use hard-line rhetoric to win public favor,” he said. “They say the country is surrounded by foreign enemies. But since the average Russian can’t fight foreign countries, he targets people around him.”

Although few explosions on the scale of Kondopoga have followed, the nationalist movement continued growing. The killing of a young Slavic soccer fan during a 2010 fight with a native of the Caucasus region Kabardino-Balkaria prompted five thousand fellow fans and nationalists to riot in central Moscow. Placing roses at the grave, Putin said the young man’s death was “a great tragedy” and promised more restrictions against immigrants. Another killing of an ethnic Russian—this time allegedly by an Azerbaijani man in an industrial Moscow district—prompted outraged locals to join hate groups in storming a shopping center, beating migrants, and attacking police. The authorities responded by targeting the victims. Seeking to stem the tide of anti-migrant anger, police raided a vegetable warehouse, where the arrested more than a thousand people under the pretext of investigating crime by migrants. Mayor Sobyanin pledged the crackdown would continue—the response that promises to fan the flames. The Levada Center recently found that 60 percent of Muscovites supported the rallying cry “Russia for Russians!” That does not bode well for a country whose Muslim population is expected to expand as more immigrants arrive from the Caucasus and Central Asia and internal migrants move from the North Caucasus to other parts of the country.¹⁰

The relationship between Russia’s Slavs and Jews is no less complicated but perhaps more paradoxical. Americans often have a hard time understanding why Jews, Everei, aren’t considered Russian and still tend not to identify themselves as such even if their ancestors have lived there for centuries. While others may not find that unusual in a generally xenophobic former empire that co-opted hundreds of ethnicities, Russian anti-Semitism does have some unique characteristics. Historian James Billington traces their development to the advance of Muscovite self-identity in the fifteenth century, when an “anti-Jewish fervor” was “built into Muscovite ideology.”¹¹

Muscovite pretensions to being “chosen,” he explains, bred hostility toward older Jewish claims to the same distinction, made more acute by envy of the more cosmopolitan culture of Jewish groups that interacted with the Slavs, mainly at the edges of their territory. They included Jews from Western Europe as well as the Turkic Khazars in the Caucasus, whose leaders converted to Judaism.

Nevertheless, Russia’s small population of Jews escaped serious persecution until the late eighteenth century, when Catherine the Great acquired large swaths of Lithuanian and Polish land heavily populated by Jews after Russia conspired with Prussia and Austria to partition the once powerful Polish-Lithuanian Empire.

Catherine marked off a territory that included parts of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine exclusively for Jews. Heavily taxed, they were forbidden to leave without permission. Poverty in the shtetls of the so-called Pale of Settlement was dreadful, and its inhabitants were never free from fear of repression and violence, especially under the conservative Nicholas I in the mid-1800s. However, their oppression began in earnest at the end of the century, when they faced waves of anti-Jewish pogroms (derived from the Russian word meaning “to storm” or “destroy”) that swept the empire after a period of relative calm under the reforming Alexander II, liberator of the serfs.

The reactionary new tsar, Alexander III, was a staunch anti-Semite whose conservative adviser Konstantin Pobedonostsev believed Russia’s “Jewish problem” would be solved by the conversion to Orthodoxy of a third of Jews, the emigration of another third and the death of the rest.¹² Alexander progressively tightened laws against Jews, banning them from the countryside and from participating in local elections even within the Pale. Jews were also ejected from Kiev and Moscow. More pogroms followed after a nationalist newspaper in 1903 published what it said was the text of a Jewish plan for world domination. Possibly written with the help of the secret police, the so-called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” purportedly documented the minutes of a meeting between Jewish leaders to plan their global hegemony, which would be achieved by controlling the world’s press and economies.

By the turn of the century, the Russian Empire held more than five million Jews, most inside the Pale, roughly half the world’s Jewish population. But millions were emigrating, many to the United States. The misery of shtetl life also motivated Jews to become prominent in revolutionary politics, whose promise of “internationalism” offered a path to assimilation through a new, common identity. Many Jews became prominent Bolsheviks. Others were leaders of the rival Menshevik faction of the Social Democratic Labor Party, whose founders of were also Jewish. Life improved very little for most Jews after the Revolution, however. Tens of thousands died in pogroms during the civil war, many in Ukraine. Still, the Pale’s demise prompted the migration of almost half its Jews to locations elsewhere in the Soviet Union, where they were able to attend school and settle in industrializing cities.

Although Stalin’s repression didn’t overtly target Jews over other groups—the Communist Party ostensibly opposed anti-Semitism—his barely concealed prejudice surfaced near the end of his rule, when he accused a group of predominantly Jewish Moscow doctors of conspiring to assassinate Soviet leaders. Hundreds were arrested for allegedly taking part in the so-called Doctors’ Plot. What would have almost certainly become another mass purge involving arrests and executions, this time directed at Jews, ended with Stalin’s death in March 1953 and was quickly declared a hoax.

Increasing numbers of Jews tried to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere during the decades that followed. Although the authorities attempted to limit the flow, international pressure, increased by American sanctions under the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974, forced Moscow to raise its quotas. In 1989, a record number of Jews—more than seventy thousand—left the Soviet Union, mostly for the United States.

To his credit, Putin has publicly fought discrimination against Jews and made the opening of a Jewish museum in Moscow a priority. However, hearing otherwise apparently informed people explain their dislike for Jews by assigning them characteristics of the old stereotypes has darkened some of my many days in Russia. Although dark-skinned people bear the brunt of Russian xenophobia today—“black” refers to people from the Caucasus as well as Africans—anti-Semitism remains strong.

The recent anti-migrant riots have encouraged speculation that Putin’s greatest political threat comes less from the liberal opposition than from nationalists doubting his devotion to their hard-line patriotism. Among them, MP Belov—who would soon thereafter be sentenced to six months in a penal colony for inciting racial hatred—informed a British reporter that “normal societies” boast active civil societies. “But in the period of Vladimir Putin’s rule,” Belov continued, “everything was done to get rid of civil society and revive aspects of Soviet totalitarianism. The elites are corrupt, and not working in the country’s best interests.”¹³ Large groups of nationalists who joined the 2011 protests against Putin made many other participants, most from the equivalent of the left, uncomfortable.

Putin responded in one of his election manifestos with contradictory criticisms and prescriptions. His favoring of harsher punishments for internal migrants committing crimes outside their native regions harked back to tsarist laws restricting the movement of Jews. A week later, one month before his reelection, the same Dmitri Rogozin who had briefly headed the Kremlin’s short-lived nationalist Rodina Party sought to portray the candidate’s ramblings as part of a long tradition of grand visions for the country. A savvy young politician, Rogozin had achieved prominence in the 1990s by leading a lobby group called the Congress of Russian Communities, which advocated the rights of Russians abroad. Following his stint with Rodina, Putin named him ambassador to NATO in Brussels, where his saber rattling earned Rogozin a high-powered job back home as deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry. Some believe Putin is grooming the sharp-tongued politician to succeed him.

In a newspaper article, Rogozin lauded Putin’s manifesto as an “unprecedented event” that would have “long-term consequences for the development of our statehood.” Russia’s great calamities in history, he wrote, took place when past leaders failed to cater to the needs of ethnic Russians, the country’s “state-forming people.” Although Nicholas II sensed looming catastrophe in 1917, he helped provoke revolution by appealing too late for support “from Russian patriots and conservatives.” “Traitors” led by Gorbachev, Rogozin continued, contributed to the collapse of the USSR seventy years later by allowing the pressure of “ethno-nationalism” in various Soviet republics to tear the union apart. Painting a picture of impending global doom in a tract that could have been written by a nineteenth-century Slavophile, he accused the United States of hatching “hegemonic plans” that would divide the world in a new struggle for resources. A “fifth column” of liberals was doing Washington’s bidding by working to split the “great Russian people.” Rogozin praised Putin as the only European leader “who has not been run over by the steamroller of American hegemonism.”

Election-season fearmongering, perhaps, but with serious implications. By the end of the year, a presidential commission had proposed a theory of a special Russian “civilization” that is separate from the West. Drawing a distinction between the description for ethnic Russian, russkaya, and the word that pertains to the Russian state, rossiiskaya, it openly derives from nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky, a highly conservative nationalist who promulgated a theory of “historical cultural types.”¹⁴

The chest thumping that passed for ideology wasn’t really prompted by a fear of Russia’s collapse—which the rabble-rousing rhetoric only encouraged—as much as by worry that what would collapse was Putin’s regime. I have to say that my years of observation cause me to see it very differently from Rogozin, as do most of the relatively small numbers of Russians who think like most educated Westerners. The attempt to co-opt the nationalist vote by legitimizing and glorifying the current authorities with yet another contradictory whitewashing of the past can only encourage the destructive forces that have made Russia a dangerous place to live if you’re not a white Slav.

Isolating Russia as its own civilization has enabled Putin not only to brand his opponents as traitors but also reinforce his authority over possible rivals within the elite by threatening to accuse them of the same offense. His critics have had a hard time responding partly because Russia lacks a tradition of loyal, constructive opposition. That helps explain why the majority seems to have accepted Putin’s painting of his rivals as radicals together with his seemingly grand, uncompromising visions, cynical and hollow as they may be.

That’s not to say that advocates of gradual reform have no precedents apart from the towering figure of Alexander Herzen. Among the others was a group of liberal intellectuals whose attack against the intelligentsia in Vekhi (“signposts”), a collection of essays published in 1909, unleashed a storm of controversy. Conceived by a gifted economic historian named Piotr Struve, Vekhi hit a nerve by laying into what the writers believed was the dogmatism and radicalism that were fanning destructive revolutionary activities. After the initial three thousand copies of the succès de scandale sold out almost overnight, four more printings quickly followed, along with a virtual industry of books and articles repudiating its premises.

It was all about another lasting problem of Russian governance—the obstacles to compromise, the intransigence, that developed under absolutism. The Vekhiists believed the reforms Nicholas II had been forced to adopt after the 1905 revolution obliged the intelligentsia to try working with his regime. That position was more controversial than it may sound because even moderate groups rejected compromise with the otherwise rigid tsar, including the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets, who would lead the revolutionary provisional government in 1917 before the Bolsheviks hijacked it. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev decried revolutionaries’ withering attacks on their rivals as assaults on knowledge. The intelligentsia, he wrote, “did not have an interest in truth itself: it demanded that truth become an instrument of social revolution, of popular welfare, and of human happiness.”¹⁵ Berdyaev charged that the imposition of populist but despotic standards in the name of “love of the people” was subjecting Russian spiritual and cultural values to political interests. Sergei Bulgakov, a former Marxist like Berdyaev who became a controversial Orthodox Christian theologian, contended the intelligentsia’s worship of the people was really self-worship.

Struve—a brilliant editor and politician who helped found the Marxist movement before going on to help lead its repudiation—accused the intelligentsia of “virulent fanaticism” and a “murderous logic of conclusions and constructs.”¹⁶ Another Vekhiist, the legal scholar Bogdan Kistiakovsky, criticized its lack of interest in the basic Enlightenment principles of individual liberty and rule of law, crucial ideas borrowed from the West. “Where is our L’esprit des lois, our Du Contrat social?” he asked about the seminal works by Montesquieu and Rousseau.¹⁷ Instead, “supremacy of force and seizure of power” were paramount.

Needless to say, history vindicated the Vekhi essayists. After helping beget the Revolution, the intelligentsia went on to abet the establishment of a fanatical dictatorship that would quickly become far more murderous than the tsarist regime it had found so oppressive. In other words, the left, in a manner of speaking, shared the psychic and even emotional qualities of the right, both formed by the same absolutism. Vekhi’s metaphoric talk of despotic ideology became reality for the millions who lost their freedom.

Among them was Zhora Leimer, my grandmother Serafima’s husband, who feared the worst when he wrote his last letter to her in 1940 because he didn’t know he would soon be returned from his Ural Mountains Gulag camp to Moscow. There he was reunited with Tupolev and other aircraft designers in a minimum-security camp called a sharashka. Immortalized in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, such institutions exploited imprisoned scientists and engineers, many of whom considered themselves lucky to be able to continue conducting research for the military as a form of forced but relatively normal and well-fed labor. Permitted to visit her beloved Zhora, Serafima even hoped for his early release. Although Tupolev and others were indeed soon freed to better help the war effort, however, Zhora disappeared again. His German surname virtually sealed his fate after the Nazi invasion of 1941.

Thirty years later, Serafima wrote the Moscow city prosecutor to request his rehabilitation, as absolving people of political crimes was called. “They were scheduled to finish working on a project to develop an airplane,” she said of his group, “and were waiting to be released, as he told me during a private meeting.” Instead, she said, “I received a statement from the Moscow city council interior affairs department saying that my husband, Georgy Ludvigovich Leimer, died in 1942 in a prison in the Kirov region.”

The determined rebelliousness of Serafima’s daughter, my mother, against Soviet restrictions suggests she shared some of the same reactions to despotism. In 1967, Sergei Milovsky, the popular lawyer and man-about-town, took her aside to inform her that George was due to visit the following year. She should marry him, he said. “It’s your chance to leave this godforsaken country, and I doubt he’ll stay unmarried very long.” Tatyana didn’t agree. Common as the fantasy of escaping the Soviet Union was, she’d never seriously considered it. Besides, she’d recently broken off a serious relationship, and starting a new one with someone she’d already dated had little appeal. “Then you’re a fool,” Milovsky said sadly. Both my parents would soon be mourning his early death from cancer.

But Tatyana didn’t dismiss his advice outright. Although she rarely saw George during his visits, he made certain to meet her at least once, sometimes to give her books he’d brought for her dissertation on nineteenth-century American literature. And just before he arrived in August of 1968, something had changed that encouraged her to reconsider. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring killed the last chance to possibly make a variety of Soviet socialism work—a terrible irony, some believed—and dashed the remaining hopes of those who had admired it. Some had dreamed the effort to build communism with a human face might become a model for reform. Tatyana and her friends sank into a black mood of futility and helplessness.

When George invited her to the Aragvi restaurant, where he would sometimes meet his KGB tormentor, her announcement about wanting to leave took him aback. “That’s like a bomb in my lap,” he told her, partly because he’d come on assignment from the Sunday Times of London and knew that what he’d be writing about the country’s retreat toward what was called neo-Stalinism would make trouble for them both if his articles appeared with his byline. But marrying Soviets to get them out was hardly unusual for foreigners, and he promised to do his best. Before his articles and the book they comprised, Message from Moscow, were published (anonymously), and before the biography of Solzhenitsyn, George was still in decent favor with the authorities, who were not beyond believing that granting Tatyana permission to marry might help induce him to write more positively about the Soviet Union. He was also set to return the following year for another assignment, and Milovsky had pledged to use his connections to help.

After more struggles with the authorities—and after considerable anxiety because Tatyana would have a big black mark against her for wanting to marry an American if their application had been denied—they celebrated good news. Serafima and a handful of relatives and friends, including Milovsky, attended their ceremony in one of Moscow’s palaces of marriages. During the dinner that followed at the Praga restaurant, the husband of one of Tatyana’s childhood friends used his toast to say, regretfully, that “our best things always go for export.” Photographs of the dashing couple carrying a wedding present of a shiny samovar on a traditional visit to Red Square soon appeared on the front page of the British Communist Party’s newspaper The Daily Worker, purporting to show that Russian women could indeed marry Westerners without trouble. Tatyana soon discovered that that issue of the paper had been withdrawn everywhere in Moscow, surely because such mixed marriages were not to be encouraged.

Since it would have been difficult to arrange a honeymoon afterward, George and Tatyana had already taken theirs: a cruise up the Volga River for an article he would write. Although they were far from strangers, Tatyana was not the girl of sixteen who had met George a decade earlier, so both were delighted to find themselves falling back in love during their two weeks together on the great river. She remembered telling herself she’d marry George soon after they first met, when the taxi materialized to take her to the Bolshoi. “Maybe it was part of some grand plan,” she’d later muse about their long separation. “It let me grow up by leading my own life, to mature in my own way. Nothing good would have happened if we’d stayed together during those early years.”

She finally joined George in London on the warm, sunny afternoon of May 1, 1970. Despite her friends’ delight at and envy of her departure from Moscow, the fact that she’d left her old life and everything she’d known didn’t register until, halfway to Britain, her plane’s captain announced they were flying over Copenhagen. “Suddenly it seemed unreal. Really? Copenhagen? That’s it, I thought—I’ve actually left! It was an incredible feeling—I was somewhere in the sky and my dream was coming true! I was so lucky, so happy.”

Tatyana found Moscow transformed almost beyond recognition when she first returned to visit more than two decades later, in the 1990s. “It was night and day. People were no longer afraid. They dressed well, expressed themselves freely and had opportunities. We’d had none of that.”

But the Russian psyche remains heavily influenced by the Soviet experience. The stultification of the social sciences under communism, cut off from developments in the West for so long, may be partly to blame. Edward Keenan believes the lack of analytical tools that might have enabled people to understand their roles in a changing society helped breed deep cynicism about the contradictions between official ideology and their personal experience. The cynicism encouraged pilfering, alcoholism, violence and other antisocial behavior that served to reinforce the traditionally pessimistic view of human nature.

Widespread cynicism endures, together with much antisocial behavior. And despite signs that Russian attitudes were again changing with the protests of 2011, a Levada Center poll conducted soon after Putin’s reelection a few months later showed him retaining overwhelming support, chiefly among stay-at-home mothers (69 percent) and workers (55 percent). Among them were gray masses of uniformly older, mostly working-class people who had attended pro-Putin rallies, many paid or coerced to do so by their employers. What they lacked in outward enthusiasm for the candidate who painted himself as their protector they made up in numbers: tens of thousands of representatives of a vast, vulnerable population for which stability remains more important than change, with its possibility of yet more upheaval.

Still, the growing contradictions between rhetoric and reality will inevitably threaten the president’s ability to dominate the ideological battle for Russians’ hearts and minds. The sweeping prescriptions and grandiose visions have done nothing to stem the soaring corruption, worrisome demographic trends, growing alcoholism and other signs that serious crisis may threaten. My mother, who is among those Russians optimistic that their country will someday join the civilized world, believes the similarities between the Putin and Brezhnev eras make such a transition all but inevitable. She cites a friend who liked to predict in the early 1970s that the then-unsinkable-seeming Soviet empire would eventually collapse under its own weight, “a colossus on clay legs.”

The government is highly attuned to one dynamic in particular: the price of oil. Yegor Gaidar, the prime minister who oversaw Russia’s drastic economic reforms of 1991 and 1992, argued that oil exports enabled the Communist Party authorities to offset serious structural problems in the 1970s and ’80s, including the need to buy vast volumes of foreign grain to make up for stagnating production at home.¹⁸ The arrangement lasted until a glut in global oil production sent prices plummeting to less than ten dollars a barrel in 1986. The ensuing decline in Soviet production hastened economic collapse by starving Moscow of the hard currency it desperately needed.

Others disagree about the importance of oil’s role in the Soviet collapse. However, one point is clear: the government today is far more dependent on energy than the Soviet Union ever was. Since the economy recovered from the economic meltdown in 1998 that sent the Yeltsin administration into crisis, the quadrupling of oil prices enabled various governments under Putin to increase federal budget expenditures ninefold in real terms in a decade, while wages almost tripled.¹⁹ But economists predict the government will eventually run into trouble. Although its 2008 budget was calculated to balance with oil at sixty dollars a barrel, the level necessary for balancing soon rose to $120, and even that may not be high enough in the future, thanks to Putin’s pledges to increase, by hundreds of billions of dollars, federal wages and other expenses aimed at generating support from the masses. And although energy sales have brought annual trade surpluses of almost eight hundred billion dollars, Russians’ huge desire for foreign products has driven an inexorable rise in imports that may one day surpass exports.

The country got a taste of what may happen when cash starts to become short in late 2011, when Putin lashed out at several cabinet members for failing to fund his election promises in a new budget. Some ministers, including Medvedev, had the temerity to snipe back for the first time in recent memory, prompting temporary speculation that Putin’s authority was declining. That exchange took place when oil prices were still climbing to record highs. With new drilling techniques increasing global production, that may not last. Even if prices stay level, the Russian oil industry is still largely living off Soviet-era investment. To maintain production levels, which are expected to decline by 2020, the government will have to invest far more—which will probably prompt bitter battles over oil profits. Lack of investment and failure to reform the economy have added urgency to predictions of dramatically slowing growth and worries about looming recession that have heightened anxieties about the future.

If civil society fails to topple Putin’s regime—or that of a chosen successor—perhaps economic decline will. With corruption also taking ever-larger slices of the national wealth, the masses who continue supporting Putin—because they feel the government provides them with more benefits and stability than they would otherwise enjoy—may not do so indefinitely.

To truly join the Western world, however, Russians will have to do more than change their political establishment because the obstacles lie not just in Putin but also in the formative factors of geography, climate and history, which remain powerful shapers of Russian behavior. Among other vital things, the people will have to move beyond looking to the state to compensate for the country’s traditional backwardness and resulting insecurities.

Real change would require fundamentally new ideals. “After a brief period of declaring allegiance to Western values in the 1990s, we’ve moved away from them,” Arseniy Roginsky of Memorial reminded me. “We said we would respect the individual, but it never happened. That path was far more difficult than we ever imagined.” Instead, he said, “the search for stability and a Russian national identity led right back to the old Soviet anti-Western sentiments.”

The foreign affairs scholar Georgy Mirsky, who taught at Princeton and New York University, told me he believes the process will take generations. “Whenever my American students asked why bad news was always coming out of Russia, with its great culture, I’d tell them to imagine being put into a psychiatric asylum when they were three years old and released at thirty. Could you be a normal person? Of course not. After seventy years of Soviet rule, one of the most antihuman regimes in history, how can you expect the next generation to be normal?”